KARACHI, July 2: A 22-year-old man died of dengue in the Abbasi Shaheed Hospital on Tuesday, taking the number of deaths from dengue fever this year to three, officials said.

The youth, Mohammad Zubair, had been admitted to hospital on June 27 in a critical condition.

Sources in the hospital said that he was a second-time victim of the deadly fever that made his case complicated from the outset of his treatment.

“The young man was admitted to hospital in a precarious condition by his family after he had developed a lot of complications,” said Dr Shakeel Mullick, focal person for the dengue surveillance cell of Sindh, while speaking to Dawn.

The victim was a resident of North Karachi.

Officials did not share any personal details of the victim with the media.

This year’s first death from dengue in the city occurred in May and the second was reported last month.

The provincial health authorities said that the first victim was a young woman belonging to a middle-class family while the second victim was a 34-year-old man.

Officials initially identified North Nazimabad, SITE, Clifton Cantonment, Saddar Town and Gulistan-i-Jauhar as ‘vulnerable areas’ and decided to give them ‘special attention’.

This year’s three deaths have been reported from New Karachi, Gulistan-i-Jauhar and North Karachi areas.

According to the data compiled by the dengue surveillance cell, a total of 369 dengue cases have been reported in Sindh this year.

A total of 359 cases have been reported in Karachi, while 10 cases in rest of the province.

It said that 12 dengue patients were still admitted to different hospitals of the city, including nine new cases reported from Karachi on Thursday.

The patients were admitted to different hospitals, it added. Last year more than 600 cases of dengue fever were reported out of which two people died, including a woman.

In 2011, 858 dengue cases and 16 related deaths had been reported from Karachi.